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Siege of Kobarid
The Siege of Kobarid colloquially known as the Battle of Kobarid, was a brutal conflict that occurred shortly after the in the waxing months of 2556. The engagement began when a band of warships—captained by Sangheili dissidents of the " " faction—discovered and subsequently assaulted the UNSC colony Kobarid, a glistening inner colony that was saved from the Covenant onslaught during the Human-Covenant War by mandated communications blackout protocols. The battle directly succeeded Operation HARMONICA, an operation carried out on the planet by UNSC forces to neutralize the insurgency responsible for a recent string of terrorist acts and riots; when the Storm fleet translated in-system and subsequently besieged Kobarid, the local Defence Force assets were reassigned but were overrun by the attacking forces. A UNSC battle group was organized and deployed to combat the threat as part of Operation DOMINION, a counter assault spearheaded by the freshly assimilated Battle Group 4/G-3, a subordinate command of the UNSC Fourth Fleet, along with a detachment of Spartan special warfare operators. Background Before the siege itself began, another conflict was underway on the Kobarid colony; the UNSC was carrying out Operation HARMONICA, an initiative intended to suppress the ongoing civil unrest and insurgent activity that had grown increasingly common in the preceding years, most notably a terrorist attack in which a rebel suicide bomber destroyed the eight-story administrative capital building Holden Hall with a backpack explosive, killing dozens and injuring nearly two hundred. Locally garrisoned personnel were deployed across the Janvier continent and a handful of islands in the Gatsby Archipelago to bolster outnumbered—and frequently outgunned—police details. Tensions flared and a number of firefights subsequently broke out, nearly all of which ending in the capture, death, or fleeing of all dissident guerrillas. One week after the mission began, Task Force 9-Alpha arrived in-system and rapidly inserted Marines into hostile zones while allocating a limited number of personnel toward fledgling humanitarian efforts in areas that had been ravaged by intensive rioting, air raids, firefights, or a combination of the aforementioned. During this segment of the campaign, UNSC Army defector Edward Kaiser led a band of twenty footsoldiers and a trio of M12 Warthog LAAVs in an assault on Painesfield, an isolated town situated within the rolling Northern Highlands. Following a half-hour engagement between the attackers and local police officers, a D77-TCE Pelican dropship arrived and deployed its cargo of sixteen Marines and an under-towed Warthog before remaining on-location to provide direct fire support. The soldiers pursued and intercepted the insurgents throughout the labyrinth of low-rise complexes until all but three of the rebels, one of which being Kaiser, were killed in action or arrested. By the first of April, support for the revolt had all but subsided, having once more withdrawn into the crevices of society, while the UNSC armed forces only suffered a meager thirty-three casualties of war. Invasion At approximately 2330 hours Colonial Standard Time on April 3rd, 2556, the detected a bulbous anomaly traversing local Slipstream space and potentially headed for the TS 116497 planetary system, but further investigation into the matter proved fruitless. Several minutes later, a trans-Slipspace gash appeared in-system and approximately one fifty-six thousand kilometers away from Kobarid. Immediately after, a Storm naval detail traversed the rift and back into subspace. Scanners quickly identified the battle group's composition: two destroyers, two frigates, and two corvettes. Kobarid, in addition to its neighboring colonies in the system as well as a handful of nearby UNSC-controlled systems, were put on full alert, battle-ready status, and as per the notification, 9-Alpha's carrier Esperanto and frigates Blue Tiger and From the Island maneuvered to intercept the approaching hostile fleet. The UNSC Esperanto employed its complement GA-TL1 Longsword interceptors to hastily lay a field of XM205/R nuclear mines throughout the Storm fleet's projected trajectory. The Longswords were quick to launch a conglomerated salvo of missiles before the Covenant attack with their long-ranged weapons. The Covenant corvettes pulled ahead of the larger ships of war to draw fire while launching a volley of plasma torpedoes at the defensive force. They scrambled Banshee and Seraph squadrons to combat incoming Longsword interceptors and Broadsword multirole fighters; both sides quickly took heavy losses in a flurry of missiles and plasma. Meanwhile, the UNSC ships fired their four combined , crippling the foremost corvette's power system and severing one of the destroyers across the narrowest point of its main hull. However, the Storm ships had already managed to discharge the majority of their plasma cannons, and the majority of their torpedoes tracked and impacted the frigate Blue Tiger, obliterating the light capital ship. The UNSC Navy ships returned fire with an equally impressive firing of ship-to-ship missile pods. Those which did not fall victim to the pulse laser point defenses pounded shields and exposed hull points on the Storm warships and destroyed a handful of hostile space fighters. Within half an hour, each side of the battle was down one ship, and several more had been disabled to some capacity, including most of her bow maneuvering thrusters. Meanwhile, a number of dropships had evaded the ongoing space battle and descended from orbit upon coastal population centers throughout the Gatsby Archipelago. The majority of the craft landed in the three largest metropolitan areas of the 152-island archipelago. Hundreds of , , and footsoldiers swarmed the cities of Gibraltar Square, New Hilliard, and Port Espin, murdering and capturing countless civilians while UNSC Army assets from Firebase Kilo-Bravo raced to reinforce the overwhelmed defenses. A slew of dropships and gunships soon arrived and engaged Storm forces on multiple fronts while air raids targeted the invaders' makeshift downtown outpost, the location of an unfinished landing pad. Retaliation Endgame Aftermath Order of Battle Behind the Scenes *Kobarid, Slovenija, the colony's in-universe namesake, was the site of a World War I battle between Italy and the Central Powers. At the time, the city was under control of Austro-Hungary and named Caporetto. Gallery File:SoK2.png|A squadron of UNSC Army Sparrowhawks patrol the Katzuko Desert. File:ODST team.png|Orbital Drop Shock Troopers engage Storm lances in the Northern Highlands. Category:Reconciliation